


Fandom is NOT mostly slash

by Franzeska



Series: March Meta Matters [16]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 15:12:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23175346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/pseuds/Franzeska
Summary: "Fandom is NOT mostly slash" and related tumblr posts
Series: March Meta Matters [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664836
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	1. Fandom is NOT mostly slash

**Author's Note:**

> Uploaded for day 16 of the March Meta Matters Challenge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: December 21, 2016.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/154780855834/fandom-is-not-mostly-slash
> 
> In the years since then, I've seen this same dumb assertion repeated by nearly every prominent meta writer, right on through Youtube personalities like Sarah Z. Shame on all of you for handing ammo to your enemies and making a minority hobby look like some hegemonic authority that should be fought against. It's fucking absurd.

A sentiment I’ve seen going around a lot lately is that fanfic is predominantly slash. You see it in every “Why so much m/m?” rant and in most meta about AO3. I’ve heard versions of it on Fansplaining and much more blatantly and egregiously on One True Podcast.

But if you bother to look at FFN where shipping statistics are harder to generate, you see that het still outnumbers slash in most fandoms, and even the big slash fandoms often have more het than they do on AO3. If you look at Wattpad, Mary Sue/1D guys vastly outnumbers 1D slash. Twilight is a het juggernaut fandom, and it’s far from alone. It’s just AO3 where slash is king. That’s because AO3 was founded as a reaction to slash being less welcome elsewhere. AO3′s ship-centric structure that makes it so easy to get statistics you guys use to shit on slash was created because it was hard to search for slash on previous websites. Those sites were run by people who didn’t think it was important because they assumed most stories were the default, “normal” type: het. (Or, in many cases, “gen” with canon-ish plots with canon-level het content.) Complaining about AO3 being slash-heavy is tantamount to saying that people with similar tastes aren’t allowed to group themselves by those tastes. It’s saying that it’s not okay for there to be even one place where slash outnumbers other things.

It makes me angry that many of the big purveyors of meta in this day and age are so ignorant of recent fandom history that their arguments start from the blatant falsehood that most fic is slash. If most fic around you is slash, it’s because you’ve chosen to surround yourself with like-minded fans. Love AO3. Hate AO3. It’s up to you whether you use it at all. But don’t use it as a weapon just because you’re insecure about your own tastes or angry that nobody is spoon-feeding you longfic of your favorite ship.

This thought brought to you by marathoning a lot of old One True Podcast episodes while driving home for the holidays. (Seriously, guys, way to disrespect other fans.)

Next time you see someone’s meta starting from this assumption, call them on it.


	2. responses to Fandom is NOT mostly slash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: December 29, 2016.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/155128724069/fandom-is-not-mostly-slash  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/155128987019/fandom-is-not-mostly-slash

> spectacledotter:not all fandoms on AO3 (and frankly I’d venture to say more than half at a minimum) are mostly slash anyway… I know of the ones I frequent the top five ships are usually het or mostly het. where’s these gay dominated fandoms they’re complaining about and how do I sign up

Haha. Good point.

Basically, the really ginormous fandoms on AO3 tend to be slash-dominated aside from Once Upon a Time. If you look at Destination Toast’s stats or centrumlumina’s annual analysis of ships on AO3, you’ll see the usual suspects: Destiel, Sterek, Johnlock, etc. The live-action, Western media stuff that has a ton of guys in the main cast and not many women tends to have a big slash fandom.

Overall, AO3 does have a big proportion of slash even if you filter out the biggest fandoms, but you are absolutely right that one’s personal experience can still be very different, depending on what fandoms you frequent.

> bitternest: #fandom #history #ao3 #ffn #and yet somehow fandom still manages to throw f/f under the bus

Well, yeah, @bitternest, but I suppose that’s the subtext of this post: bitter femslashers (or, I suspect more often, bitter people who think they ought to be femslashers out of duty) often complain about the lack of femslash by blaming the presence of m/m slash.

It’s fair to say that there’s much less f/f. It’s fair to ask why. But it is objectively not true that fandom is all m/m or that fandom hates writing about female characters: het is very popular! So I want us to move on from blaming m/m in discussions of f/f to starting from a more realistic view of what fandom actually looks like.


	3. There is no one, natural progression in reading tastes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: December 30, 2016.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/155180683729/fandom-is-not-mostly-slash
> 
> I'm sorry to say that, yet again, some entitled little fucks who can't read whined about my responses. What the post below refers to is the actual content of kitsuneheart's slideshow and talk... which I _bothered to read_. Just saying.
> 
> The slideshow is no longer available, but the speech is still up as of March 2020 when I'm uploading this to AO3.
> 
> I maintain that we need to jettison the idea that everyone naturally "graduates" to f/f just as much as we need to stop acting like m/m is The Revolution and f/f doesn't exist and/or is all dutyfic.

> kitsuneheart: I run an entire panel on this! Specifically, I run a panel called “Don’t Like, Don’t Read: A Queer History of Fandom.” I’ve run it once, so far, but I’m doing it again at Sacanime Winter 07 (just a few weeks away), and I’m hoping to get in at YaoiCon and Fanime.
> 
> If anyone is interested, here’s links to my slideshow and my speech itself. Sorry that the speech is a bit poorly edited.
> 
> The slideshow (on Dropbox)
> 
> [The speech (on Google Drive)](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tj6Q5ItKOwkkj1hKPjLneG1-ccD0EWiJRyEuGtquAlQ/edit)

That’s a great talk! I love the look at femslash in zines. It does feel like it is specifically aimed at femslashers and designed to be given at a femslash con though, and it sounds like that’s not the case?

It feels like you’re positing a trajectory of fannish enlightenment that goes from starting at m/f, transitioning to m/m, and ending up at f/f. It works that way for some people, but it’s a mistake to posit this as the path to self awareness for the queer female fic fan, which is what the subtext here feels like to me. It’s just like that annoying thing slashers do where we pretend that slash is somehow more advanced than het, and any sufficiently mature, experienced fan will have “graduated” to it.

For me, types of pairing are more like flavors at the ice cream shop. I may or may not feel like pistachio today, and I’m annoyed that few places carry red bean or black sesame, but I didn’t find myself and suddenly stop ordering chocolate. I realize it’s a talk on queer fandom history, not just queer pairing history, but there are plenty of queer fans whose fic tastes never do end up aligning with their real sex lives. There’s no unidirectional “progress” here.

**“Now, for those of you who have never seen Robin of Sherwood, which is probably everyone”**

Hahaha. That is so true! Poor RoS fandom. If only it had been more easily available on VHS in the 90′s, it probably would have had a resurgence. Same with The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. Time was, Michael Praed was to fandom like Richard Armitage is now.

**“You’ll notice I didn’t really talk on “The Man From UNCLE,” which was an early fandom based around a British television show.”**

MFU is a U.S. show staring an American actor playing either an American or Canadian agent (depending on whether you count tie-in materials as canon) and a Scottish actor playing a Soviet agent with an accent that wandered from the UK to the USSR and back again. The boss is British (essentially reprising his role from North by Northwest, not that anyone ever said so on the show), but it’s definitely not a British television show. The Professionals was the UK show that had an early slash fandom. Blake’s 7 was another big zine fandom, though not wall-to-wall slash like Pros fandom was.

**“The Uber novel. Kind of a step up in quality from zines.”**

This is a bit of a headscratcher for me. Ubers were certainly a massive step up in the availability of long, quality f/f fanfic. Zine novels were a thing long before Xena premiered. 80 pages isn’t anything new or special for fic by the 90′s. Again, I get the sense that this talk is specifically addressed to a femslash con crowd?

But, overall, great talk! Brava!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cosmic-llin also weighed in about kismet, which is most likely the first f/f zine fic. That commentary can be read here:
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/156776292194/fandom-is-not-mostly-slash


End file.
